GOOD MORNING and welcome to Morning Tech, your near-miss in the hit parade of EU tech politics and policy.

— WHAT’S HAPPENING

GOOGLE HITS BACK: Google has finally filed its formal response to the Commission’s antitrust charges over its e-commerce search functionality. Around 20 firms have complained to the Commission that Google suppresses competition in markets from air travel to shopping by promoting its own e-commerce services in its search results. As it has done in the past, Google is intent on dragging Amazon and eBay into the equation, principally to show how competition had thrived. Their services may not be like-for-like, Google argues, but they are an important feature of the competitive landscape. The Alphabet subsidiary also relies on research it has conducted of a few European markets, apparently showing that hundreds of new price comparison services have emerged during the course of the case — an argument which would again counter accusations that it has throttled such websites. Here’s Nicholas Hirst’s piece: http://politi.co/1Kngw5J

UNWORKABLE, UNJUSTIFIABLE: Google also tears into the remedy suggested by the Commission. To recap: the Commission’s charge sheet indicated that the search engine should treat all vertical search services equally, i.e., showcasing rival product comparison sites among its own shopping results. But, Google asks, would that requires the company to create a standard form for any comparison site to enter its product details? And how would it rank them — according to price, or client service, or reviews or delivery distance? Google also argues that such a requirement amounts to “an obligation to supply” and that such an obligation, normally imposed on incumbent utility firms, would be excessive. Read Google’s blog on the response here: http://bit.ly/1m4wrFI

COMPLAINANTS HIT BACK: “Simply another attempt to divert attention” is how complainant group iCOMP described Google’s blogpost. Its own blogpost called on the search engine to debate the issue at an oral hearing, something that Google will not do. And this came from another Microsoft-backed complainant group, FairSearch: “We have seen this movie before. Defendants in big European antitrust cases have made the same arguments. Just like Google here, they have argued that the EC is incorrectly defining the market in which harm is occurring…The truth, as in previous cases, is that the Commission has properly defined the market into which Google has leveraged its overwhelming dominance in search.” Of course, little over a decade ago the Commission was laying into Microsoft over its leveraging of its operating system dominance to hurt rivals such as Sun in the work group server OS market. At the time, Microsoft tried to contest the Commission’s market definition for interoperable systems. It lost the case (reminder: http://bit.ly/1hhK1dc).

DUTCH SURVEILLANCE: The Dutch government proposed a new security law in early July that is open for comment until the end of this month. It calls for the cooperation of “providers of communication services” in intercepting users’ data, but it has a very broad definition for such providers. Tele2, a Swedish telco that operates in the Netherlands, gave its contribution to the consultation yesterday, arguing that the bill’s definition would cover every business and social organization in the country (including churches and sports clubs) that has a private network or a website — 360,000 of them, by the carrier’s reckoning. “The current bill is unworkable for a provider,” Tele2 said. “It saddles our customers with burdens and obligations that they cannot bear, where most of them would ultimately need the assistance of Tele2 to carry them out.” http://bit.ly/1U8jG3c

MORE “ANTI-FISA CLAUSE” PRESSURE: Another day, another industry coalition (reminder of the last one: http://politi.co/1MW7uOY) begging EU lawmakers to delete Article 43a of the draft general data protection regulation (GDPR). This is the clause that would stop companies from complying with non-EU authorities’ requests for the personal data of Europeans, unless they go through the official channels of international treaties and agreements. This time it’s the European Data Coalition (members: SAP, Ericsson, Nokia and others), which wants the Commission, Parliament and Council to “unleash the potential of data transfers” and save companies operating in multiple jurisdictions from being “damned if they do, damned if they don’t.” The coalition would also like to see the addition to the GDPR of “legitimate interest” as a justification for certain kinds of transfers. “In our connected world, with expertise and knowledge scattered internationally, there are often strong reasons for companies to share information across borders in order to benefit from global talent and to better perform support functions,” the group said in a statement yesterday. Here’s the letter they sent to the GDPR negotiators earlier this week: http://bit.ly/1NCzSFS (PDF)

HOWEVER, not everyone wants to see the GDPR eased up. German federal and state data protection commissioners have urged the negotiators to keep Article 43a, saying: “In the wake of the recent data protection scandals, better protection of the European citizens’ personal data vis-à-vis third-country institutions is urgently required.” Their statement, which features many exclamation points, also urges the EU institutions to avoid weakening purpose limitation (the legal principle that says data collected for one purpose should not be used for another) and to limit the profiling of people. The watchdogs also want users’ consent for data processing to come with an “explicit expression of intention” rather than being overly general, so that providers of online services cannot “claim for themselves, by using standard data protection rules and default settings which are not privacy-enhancing, far-reaching powers of data processing without the user’s explicit consent.” http://bit.ly/1NJHWDJ

SOUNDCLOUD SUIT: The U.K.s Performing Rights Society for Music (PRS) is to sue SoundCloud for unpaid royalties, claiming that the Berlin-based music-streamer does not give performers their fair due when their music is played on its platform. This follows years of unsuccessful licensing negotiations with the firm, the organization said. http://bbc.in/1UfjM3Z

RUSSIA MALWARE ARREST: Finnish authorities have arrested a Russian citizen who is wanted in the U.S. for spreading malware that made criminals millions of dollars. Russia claims the move was “another demonstration of the illegal practice of detaining Russian citizens abroad launched by U.S. authorities” and opposes the extradition of Maxim Senakh. There are indeed strong echoes of the cases of suspected hackers Roman Seleznev (the son of a Russian lawmaker, nabbed in the Maldives by U.S. officials in July last year) and Vladimir Drinkman (arrested in the Netherlands in 2012 and extradited to the U.S. in February this year). Russia itself has no extradition agreement with the U.S., so Russian hackers would presumably be best advised to avoid traveling abroad. http://bit.ly/1i4x5YS

GERMAN BROADBAND FUNDING: The German government is preparing to put up €2.7 billion to ensure everyone in the country has access to broadband of at least 50Mbps by 2018. The cash is needed to fill in the blank (generally rural) areas that carriers themselves are loath to address, because their spread-out population represents a poor return on investment. According to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, federal grants will typically represent around 10 percent of the rollout cost, but may in some cases go as high as 50 percent. €1.4 billion would come from general federal coffers, and €1.33 billion from mobile spectrum auctions. http://bit.ly/1JkCdyN

ONLINE RADICALIZATION: Le Monde has cast doubt on the statistics used by the French government to justify its crackdown on online “radicalization.” The publication points to the frequent claim of the interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, that 90 percent of people who drift into terrorist circles do so via the Internet, and notes that it comes from a limited study that interviewed 160 families. It also notes that almost every case of someone heading off to Syria followed a physical meeting with someone, and that experts say face-to-face contact is a far more common source of indoctrination than online. http://bit.ly/1NUDIXM

DRONE KILLS HACKER: The U.S. and U.K. killed an alleged ISIS hacker by drone in Syria earlier this week. According to the Wall Street Journal’s sources, British citizen Junaid Hussain “hacked dozens of U.S. military personnel and published personal and financial details online, including those of a general, for others to exploit…[and] helped sharpen the terror group’s defense against Western surveillance and built hacking tools to penetrate computer systems.” http://on.wsj.com/1EnZmUC

WEAPONIZED DRONES: The U.S. state of North Dakota has passed a law allowing police to deploy drones equipped with “less than lethal” weapons such as bean bag rounds and Tasers. Of course, as Ars Technica points out, weapons intended as non-lethal can sometimes be lethal in reality, and legal experts told the publication that this was a case of technology developed for the military being deployed by local law enforcement because the manufacturers ”need to expand their market.” http://bit.ly/1U88K5N

MURDER AUTOPLAY: The murder of a U.S. TV reporter and her cameraman was filmed from multiple angles, including by the gunman himself. Videos of the event went out on social media and, thanks to the way Twitter and Facebook work these days, those videos often play automatically. As when people shared ISIS’s execution footage, many users are disgusted. Here’s an analysis from the Guardian, noting how a feature designed for advertisers can have gruesome side-effects. http://bit.ly/1PAmAal

FACEBOOK says a billion people logged into its social network on Monday alone — a new record for the company. http://cnet.co/1JppCg6

AMAZON’S FIRE FIRINGS: Amazon is really successful as a retailer and cloud operator, but it doesn’t always hit the mark — its Fire smartphone, for example, was panned by critics and roundly ignored by consumers. Intended as a way to make shopping via mobile easier, it led to a $170 million (€152 million) write-down last year and reportedly left the firm with $83 million in unsold inventory. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon has sacked dozens of engineers who worked on the device in the firm’s Lab126 development facility. The piece added: “The company also has scaled back or halted some of Lab126’s more ambitious projects, including a large-screen tablet, and reorganized the division, combining two hardware units there into one.” http://on.wsj.com/1JwL3ZE

— WHAT’S COMING

(SOLID) ROLLABLE KEYBOARD: LG has revealed a mobile keyboard that can be rolled up into an easy-to-carry stick. The Rolly will go on sale in “key markets in Europe” in the fourth quarter. The Korean firm is wisely touting this as “the industry’s first solid rollable wireless portable keyboard” — there are plenty of flexible rollable keyboards out there, but they’re not particularly pleasant to type on. LG is going for the feels-like-a-desktop-keyboard angle here. http://bit.ly/1fIa0cT